Proofworks: Bulletproofing Your Evaluation Plan

Background: As health communication and social marketing activities grow more sophisticated, evaluation is not keeping pace with their innovation. Evaluators are often challenged to fully understand, track, and measure the critical aspects of a wide variety of health communication campaigns – and therefore could benefit from a tool that helps them choose appropriate, context-specific outcomes and the methods needed to assess them.

Program background: To address this need, this session introduces ProofWorks, the newest tool in the HealthCommWorks suite. ProofWorks is a web tool built to assist health communication and social marketing evaluators in the development of evaluation plans that are theory-based, strategic, and anticipatory of the documentation needs of short- and long-lead communication activities.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  ProofWorks aims to provide applied researchers and health communicators with an interactive, evidence-based tool that guides their integration of the latest methods, strategies, tactics and metrics required to develop state-of-the-art evaluation plans. ProofWorks is developed through CDC DCPC and ORISE, and is designed for use by federal, state and local health researchers, communicators and evaluators at both the senior and entry-level. The tool incorporates user input to customize evaluation plans, and through its use of distributable Wikis, it can be easily updated with ongoing feedback from both the developers and users to ensure that it never becomes outdated. As a result, users receive tailored evaluation plans suitable for the context of their program and identified population. This presentation offers a wireframe demonstration of how a health communication professional can use ProofWorks to improve their evaluation plan, and highlights how ProofWorks compliments the other message development and social media planning tools within the HealthCommWorks suite.

Conclusions: ProofWorks reduces the time and complexity of developing a comprehensive and strategic evaluation plan. By incorporating user personas and an evidence-based algorithm, ProofWorks provides health communicators with an easy and straightforward manner of selecting context-specific outcomes and assessment methods for a wide range of health communication campaigns.

Implications for research and/or practice: ProofWorks enhances a health communication professional’s ability to rapidly construct a theory-based, strategic, and applied evaluation plan suitable for the specific needs of their initiative. As an integrated part of the HealthCommWorks suite, ProofWorks provides the professional community with an improved method for evaluating what really matters in their health communication plans.